1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to semiconductor devices.
2. Related Art
Semiconductor memory devices have increased in integration to increase data storage capacities thereof. Increasing in integration may increase a failure rate of the memory cells. In turn, these failures may reduce the fabrication yield of the semiconductor memory devices. In general, even if each semiconductor memory device has only one failed memory cell, the semiconductor memory device cannot be used as a commercial product.
A lot of effort has been exerted in an attempt to increase the fabrication yields of semiconductor memory devices. For example, various repairable design schemes have been employed in the semiconductor memory devices to attempt to increase a fabrication yield of the semiconductor memory devices.
Each of semiconductor devices may be designed to include fuses that store information necessary for various internal control operations. For example, repair information on abnormal memory cells. General fuses can be programmed using laser beams in a wafer level because a logic level of each data is determined according to an electrical open/short state of each fuse. However, once the semiconductor devices are encapsulated to form semiconductor packages, it may be impossible to program the general fuses in the semiconductor packages. E-fuses are widely used to solve the aforementioned disadvantage. Each of the e-fuses may be realized using a transistor, for example, a MOS transistor. In such a case, data may be stored in the e-fuse by changing an electrical resistance value between a gate terminal and a source/drain terminal of the MOS transistor used as the e-fuse. That is, the e-fuse may be electrically open or short according to a resistance value between the gate terminal and the source/drain terminal of the MOS transistor employed as the e-fuse.
In order to correctly recognize the data stored in the e-fuses, a size of the transistors employed as the e-fuses has to be increased or amplifiers have to be used without increasing the size of the transistors employed as the e-fuses. However, in any case, there may be limitations in increasing the integration density of the semiconductor devices including the e-fuses.
Recently, e-fuse arrays have been proposed to solve the limitations of the integration density and to store the information necessary for various internal control operations.